Archive for October, 2010

Oh my gosh…I’ve been gone so long. I don’t want to bore you with the details, so let me just briefly recap in case anyone has been desperately wondering where Kirsten Sawyer has disappeared to. The one word answer: Mommyland. Since I left you (anxious over the appropriateness of wearing white pants after Labor Day) Baby #1 has officially started the Big K, and Baby #2 is officially a nursery school student. We are talking seriously big business here, folks.

I know what you’re thinking…with all the rugrats out of the house, what did I have to do all day besides blog about the fascinating rituals of packing lunchboxes and driving carpools? Well, let me be the first to tell you…it’s not all peanut butter and jelly sandwich glamor. There was a lot to do on my end, most of it causing me enormous amounts of guilt. The following are just a FEW examples in the long list of items weighing me down.

First, there was Baby #2’s school earthquake kit. As we all know, earthquakes terrify me and so I’ll admit that there was a certain amount of fear that paralyzed me from turning it in for the first couple weeks. When I finally did suck it up and assemble the required items, I was left with another dilemma. The emergency kit consisting of boxed water, some sort of strange energy biscuits and some wet-naps from Baby #1’s nursery school kit sat on my desk begging to be used, but clearly stamped with a date that indicated it will expire six months before Baby #2 graduates. To use it or not to use it? It took me another couple weeks to accept my failure as a mother and use the expired supplies because it was easier than figuring out where to get a new kit. Source of guilt #1: if an earthquake happens to occur during the few hours that Baby #2 is at school after November 2012 he will probably get food poisoning. But then in all honesty, there’s also going to be a bunch of kids forced to wear sneakers that were purchased two years earlier that probably won’t fit anymore, so a little diarrhea isn’t going to make or break the situation.

Source of guilt #2: my inability to sell wrapping paper. Within hours of school starting, Baby #1 was sent home with a big, glossy packet of overpriced crappy items that she was supposed to sell to family and friends in order to raise money for her school. They must have pep talked them in the classroom because she was ready to hit the pavement and make some sales. Sweetening the deal was a separate glossy brochure highlighting the prizes she could personally earn for making these sales, among them a marshmallow launcher and a personal DVD player. (Can I just sidebar and say what a brilliant business model it is to have adorable children sell your shit and in exchange give them some cheap, certainly lead-laden prizes and throw a few bucks to their school? Brilliant.) I put the order forms on my desk and there they remained peacefully out of sight and out of mind…until the day I realized that I was supposed to turn them in at school. That night, hours before the deadline, I sat online ordering enough wrapping paper to get Baby #1 some sort of prize so that she wouldn’t feel badly about herself when the rest of her class was rewarded for their sales prowess. I will probably never need to buy wrapping paper again.

Yet another example is source of guilt #3: my rejection of AYSO’s many pleas for parental help. Oh yes, that’s right…I not only have kids in school now, I am officially a soccer mom. But, in an effort to maintain my dignity, I am the crabbiest soccer mom sitting on the sidelines. Needless to say, the LAST thing I am going to do is volunteer to staff a snack-bar, set up fields, or organize players on team picture day. Nonetheless, when the desperate e-mails come from parents who actually are volunteering their time and energy to AYSO, I immediately delete them and then feel badly about it. I get over this guilt by reminding myself that the worse case scenario is that nobody volunteers and AYSO shuts down which would mean that next year I won’t have to spend every Saturday between September and December at a soccer field. Ugh…I really am a horrible person!

It has gone on and on like this. I have spent the last month dropping balls and racing to catch up. It has been exhausting! And that is why I have not been lovingly tending to my blog as I should. Seriously, it had been so long since I’d turned my computer on that it had some sort of a personal breakdown and thought it was March 2001! Please accept my apologies. I’m back now.